Slashdot Mirror
Where Has All My Spam Gone?
An anonymous reader writes "I have my own domain, which has its own email server, where I receive all my personal email. I've been getting about 800 emails a day, of which perhaps 20 are real. Suddenly, Sunday or Monday evening, the spam pretty much stopped. My volume of mail has plummeted to less than 100 a day, and as far as I can tell, I'm not missing any real mail — I'm still getting the email list subscriptions I'm expecting, and every time I ask someone to send me a test message, it gets through. My domain host insists that it doesn't do any spam filtering before mail gets to my inbox, and that they've changed nothing about their configuration. I run SpamAssassin on my server to mark, but not delete, spam, and download the whole mess to my home client, and I'm still seeing the occasional message tagged by SpamAssassin. But it's virtually all gone. And I haven't changed anything about my own mail configuration, or the harvestability of my site (my personal email has been harvestable for almost a decade). So what's going on? I can't believe that several major botnets would have vanished overnight. Any ideas?"
*Checks mail logs*
Yeh, you need to ask the ISP again. No sign of slowing here.
My spam has tripled over the past few days. So I'm not getting all of it, but I'm getting a chunk of it.
Cynical Idealist
And you're complaining because .... ?
My blog
Did you install Skynet 1.0?
Hey, what's that siren going off for....
When spammers took over your box, they didn't want to flood it with their own mail.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Per Ars, a 100,000 machine bot net was shut down recently. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080814-police-nab-shadow-creators-force-botnet-to-commit-suicide.html
Sorry, we've been down for maintenance and it's taking a lot longer than we originally planned. You can expect normal service to resume by next monday.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080814-police-nab-shadow-creators-force-botnet-to-commit-suicide.html
That may account for some of it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Spam Assassin is actually assassinating spam.
On another note, has anyone heard from cousin who is a Nigerian prince? He hasn't called in days and we're beginning to get worried.....
import system.cool.Sig;
... to save the health of the athletes.
...and the Chinese are busy watching 13-year olds win gold metals. Bob
We're happy to help you solve this mystery.
What is your email address?
Okay, here's the thing: nobody but you ever got spam. We all just thought it would be funny to fool you into thinking there was some kind of worldwide scamming epidemic. You don't seriously think people would be stupid enough to buy pills off strangers who email them out of the blue, do you? I thought we'd gone a bit too far and stretched the limits of credibility when we came up with the idea for the Nigerian scams, but I was wrong, you even fell for that! Nobody is stupid enough to send all their money to a "Nigerian prince".
Anyway, enough's enough. The joke's stale now, so we decided to stop sending it all to you.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
A large chunk of spam comes from a very small group of spammers. It may just be that you are only targeted by one of them, and he took a break recently.
Hang in there... he'll come back from vacation soon, and you'll be able to mortgage your penis to Nigeria again.
Assuming a third party isn't dropping your email... if they are then that's almost as bad the spam deluge - I'd rather be the one to decide what is spam than a third party who may or may not have a clue.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
I run a web hosting company and over the past couple weeks I've had a few customers report that the amount of spam has dropped. Of course, they thought that this was something wrong, but I couldn't find any evidence of increased failures, it was just that there was slightly less mail coming in.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/12/191255&from=rss
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/georgia-takes-a-beating-in-the-cyberwar-with-russia/
When the crisis abates, I expect the botnets will be returned to their regularly scheduled duties. Quite a versatile tool those botnets -- pimping V!agr4, collapsing government sites, enhancing the male doodad, distributing pr0n, bullying your neighbors (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6665145.stm). For the cost of one M1A1 tank tread, Putin bought himself a whole lot of firepower.
Advantage: Putin.
We've been seeing botnets changing desktop background to an image alerting people that they are infected with a virus. Obviously a real spam botnet operator would not alert people like that.
My theory is that some grayhat wrested control of a major botnet, and is shutting it down from the source (and alerting the victims in the process).
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Dear Sir,
We humbly apologize for the interruption in service. Please reply with your email address and our technical staff will get back to you.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I, on the other hand, consider sudden, dramatic, and completely unexplained changes to the operation of systems under my control to be a reason to worry.
I'm just funny that way.
That might actually be a not bad idea. Sending him something that can be confirmed as having been sent, and as being spammy.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
Naw, just that the Russians have shifted all their botnets' attacks toward Georgia.
Amen.
It's like we speak the same language.
Change is good. Unexpected change is very, very bad.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Maybe you could forward some spam from, say, a gmail account to your address in question. If it doesn't make it through to your server then you have a definitive record to confront your ISP with. Or, if they do get through, maybe you should buy a lottery ticket because your the luckiest admin on slashdot!
They all just got back from Black Hat / Defcon, and they're still hung over.
I find your lack of spam disturbing ...
Most spam is sent by bot-nets, mostly composed by infected pc of workplaces, school and private homes. In many countries during the second and third week of August many schools and workplaces are closed so their pc are just turned off, this mean that the bot-nets have less active nodes and so are less effective. I do receive less spam too but I think that it will be back to the sad old amount at the end of the summer :(
Unluckily Murphy was right.
I've just checked my work's logs (an ISP). The number of hits in the spam taggers fell from 12/sec to 3/sec earlier this week.
So either we're identifying less spam, or there is in fact less of it.
Seriously though ... if spammers started turning up dead where would the police even begin their investigation? There's only a pool of what, half a billion suspects?
Spammers and virus writers employed by spammers to create their zombie pools have been turning up dead for almost two years now.